Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 November 11

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November 11

What does 'metaphysica sunt, non leguntur' mean?

It seems to be Latin and was used by Frege. Can anybody help me on this? Does it mean something on the lines of 'it is [related to] metaphysics, so I wouldn't read/accept it'? Thanks - DSachan (talk) 04:18, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

It comes from medieval monks not knowing Greek writing "Graeca sunt, non leguntur" in texts ("[These words] are Greek, they are not read"). The idea I think is that people who don't know or understand metaphysics see it and ignore it or refuse to try to read it.--Cam (talk) 05:48, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Or "It's all Greek to me!" ;-) Alansplodge (talk) 08:54, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Where were those medieval monks from and why were they required to know Greek? - DSachan (talk) 07:41, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Sometimes in Latin texts, people would quote a Greek saying or other famous words, either because the concept is better expressed in Greek than in Latin, or because they want to be true to the person they quote and he/she was a Greek speaker (Socrates etc.), or to be pedantic. These particular monks who had to read the text knew Latin well, but had not been taught Greek. --Lgriot (talk) 10:18, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

A quick search for "Graeca sunt, non leguntur" (Oberlin 1782) seems to indicate that this proverb originated in the 18th century, was often used in the 19th and in decline in the 20th. Latin schools in the 18th century tought Latin as a first and Greek as a second language, hence pupils and teachers knew Latin better than Greek. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 10:25, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I just downloaded an ebook of Longfellow's poems, and many of them start with [Greek quotation], with no attempt to transcribe or copy. Non leguntur indeed. At least mediaeval monks still copied the bits they didn't understand! 86.163.1.168 (talk) 13:20, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

The original standard for Project Gutenberg used ASCII only for maximum compatibility. Not only couldn't you transcribe Greek, you couldn't put in things like the ° symbol after temperatures (made a book on an Antarctic expedition I worked on proofreading quite cumbersome.) 75.41.110.200 (talk) 15:33, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Should both be plural?

There is a minor dispute in Wikipedia about ones' complement compared to one's complement compared to ones complement arithmetic. Not that this would contribute to that debate, but if one interprets the arithmetic as complementing a string of bits with ones would it be more correct grammatically to say ones' complement or ones' complements? I noticed some old sources saying complements in plural. We're not actually going to say complements because that isn't what anyone says nowadays. Dmcq (talk) 14:37, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't matter as far your example goes since in either case "one" is singular so it's "one's complement" regardless. Hot Stop talk-contribs 14:41, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

"Ones'" with the apostrophe after the "s" means of a number of ones in the sense of "11111111". Dmcq (talk) 14:57, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

The point of the number is not all the 1's in any number, but the radix of the compliment - for example ten's compliment. Donald Knuth suggested using the apostrophe to disambiguate the comdiminished 2's compliment names - for example "9's compliment" is commonly used to mean the diminished radix compliment of base 10, but could equally mean the radix compliment of base 9 (see Method of complements). In his notation ten's (10's) compliment would mean the radix compliment of 10 and tens' compliment (10s' compliment) would be the diminished radix compliment of base eleven. This notation is not often used however, and the article says that many style guides omit the apostrophe entirely. -- Q Chris (talk) 15:12, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Well, if we follow the convention we are using on two's complement, I would say use "one's complement". —Akrabbim^talk 15:13, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately the "two's compliment" article would be consistent with both systems, referring to the radix compliment in base 2. In normal usage this is ambiguous, as it could also refer to the diminished radix compliment in base 3. Using Knuth's proposal the diminished radix compliment in base 3 would be called the twos' compliment removing the ambiguity. As noted in One's complement#Linguistic note hardly anyone uses this notation and many style guides suggest just using "twos compliment". -- Q Chris (talk) 15:37, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

In my opinion using "ones' compliment" unwarranted, Knuth is the only person to use this notation that I know of. Though Donald Knuth is a brilliant computer scientist I think that Wikipedia should follow standard usage rather than the idea of one person, even if they are a leader in the field. -- Q Chris (talk) 15:40, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Q Chris, you're talking about "compliments" but linking to articles that talk about "complements". This is very confusing for one such as I, who's confused by this whole thread anyway. Are these different things? They're different generally speaking, but maybe they have special mathematical meanings. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:08, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

No that's just my spelling! This would probably be a better topic for the mathematics desk than the language desk. -- Q Chris (talk) 22:26, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't that interested in this context in the arithmetic or making a decision about what term to use in Wikipedia, I was just wondering about the grammar behind the term as there were so many variants. Thinking about it more I guess practically any variant can be considered grammatically correct depending on how one interprets it. If there is many ones but the produce a single complement then it is ones' complement but if one is getting the complement of each digit it is complements. So when one gets the nine's/nines'/nines complement(s) of 12345 one gets 87654 and it depends on ones point of view one whether a single operation is applied to each digit, or it is applied to all the digits to produce a single result, or to all the digits to produce the complement digits. Dmcq (talk) 00:12, 12 November 2011 (UTC)